It’s About Time We All Met a Happy End (Oldřich Lipský, 1967) Cerise Howard September 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film The “Czechoslovak film miracle” of the 1960s has long been synonymous with the Czechoslovak New Wave, a term principally applied to works produced by a storied cluster of filmmakers who emerged that decade thro...
It Was Ildikó Enyedi’s 20th Century, and We Just Lived In It: My Twentieth Century (1989) Cerise Howard July 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Dualities and parallels abound in Ildikó Enyedi’s remarkable Az én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century, 1989), a singularly playful, magical realist, retro-futuristic, richly allusive, erotically charged, and wi...
Othering Heights: The Queerest of the Queer in Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls (1983) Cerise Howard December 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Prolific activist-filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim was born Holger Radtke in Nazi-occupied Latvia in 1942. He rebranded himself “Rosa”, to serve as a constant reminder to others of the pink triangle that gay prison...
To walk away, you gotta leave something behind, or a long story short: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) Cerise Howard December 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film For all that it contains resonances of queer musical elders – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), the Sandra Bernhard vehicle Without You I'm Nothing (John Boskovich, 1990) and, perhaps most of a...
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The 56th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard August 2022 Festival Reports While there was a KVIFF last year (held uncharacteristically in August, from the 20th to the 28th) and a 16-film-strong roaming festival-in-miniature (“KVIFF at Your Cinema”) staged in 2020, I could attend neit...
Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964) Cerise Howard October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s not news that the 1960s were an extraordinarily fecund time for cinema in Czechoslovakia; the output of the filmmakers connected to the FAMU-centred Czechoslovak New Wave has been celebrated unstintingly, ...
Birds, Orphans and Fools (1969): the Rule of Three in Juraj Jakubisko’s Exemplary Gallows Bacchanalia Cerise Howard July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jakubisko is kin to Brazil's Glauber Rocha, America's Robert Downey, Mexico's Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland's...
Of liberation, and of states of undress and redress both: The 54th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard October 2019 Festival Reports Oftentimes reports of mine on the venerable Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) have looked a mite askance at its gender politics. But along comes 2019 and, shut the front door – the 54th KVIFF’s t...
From Saturday to Sunday (Gustav Machatý, 1931), or: Don’t you wonder sometimes ’bout sound and vision? Cerise Howard September 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film The work of Czech director Gustav Machatý (1901–1963) is enjoying a surprise renaissance. The 76th Venice Film Festival had as its pre-opening event a screening of a new digital restoration of Extase (Ecstasy),...
It’s a Cobbler’s Lot: Peter Strickland’s Penchant for Synaesthetic, Švankmajerian Surrealism and Fetishism Cerise Howard July 2019 The Analogues of Peter Strickland "One sensation of mind, one fabric in recollection of touch." - Saleswoman Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed), waxing typically gnomic, in In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018). Peter Strickland's latest hyper-styli...
A Time of Reckoning? The 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard October 2018 Festival Reports This year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was always going to have a lot to address. For Czechs (and Slovaks), 2018 is a year overladen with anniversaries, with two in particular impossible t...
Prefab Story (Věra Chytilová, 1979): Farcical Times at a Prague High-rise Cerise Howard June 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film A common misconception in the West is that Věra Chytilová directed only a few significant, narratively and aesthetically adventurous films, and all in the 1960s – O něčem jiném (Something Different, 1963), 1966...
A Queer Tale of Two Sister Cities, 100 Years and the First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema Cerise Howard December 2017 Festival Reports The First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema 13-15 November 2017 Lenfilm Studio, St. Petersburg Colloquium website: https://new.culturalforum.ru/event/2017-11-12-pervyj-kollokvium-fipressi-posvy...
Pearls of the Deep, or Five Masterly Apprentices’ Guides to Bohumil Hrabal’s Gift of the Gab Cerise Howard September 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film The 1960s' Czechoslovak New Wave was lightning in a bottle, a glorious film miracle born of an unrepeatable collision of societal and political factors. An extraordinary pool of talented young filmmakers came t...
Of Female Trouble Here, There and Everywhere: The 30th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard July 2016 Festival Reports Ah, anniversaries. How readily a landmark – and a sense of obligation towards its acknowledgment being given a due sense of occasion – might become more millstone than milestone. And so the challenge presented ...
The Nature of The Beast Remains… Irrepressible! Cerise Howard May 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film Few more controversial figures have enlivened cinema than the Polish polymath Walerian Borowczyk; far fewer still experienced so massive a fall from critical grace. At the epicentre of this fall lay La Bête (Th...
Whose are the Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant? Cerise Howard March 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film “When it came to Fassbinder, ... one was made to feel that the real drama in film after film wasn't so much in the makeshift characters or the fruit-salad images but in the offscreen intrigues of a baby Caligul...
Local and/or General… Of Time and Place at the 50th Karlovy Vary and 6th Odessa International Film Festival Cerise Howard September 2015 Festival Reports Feature image: Eva Zaoralová holding aloft her book, The Story of a Festival 2015 found the summertime festivals in Karlovy Vary and Odessa in introspective but nonetheless celebratory moods. In Karlovy Vary, ...
Fly Me to the Moon: Love and Lunacy in The Outrageous Baron Munchausen Cerise Howard June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Of all the takes on the oft-filmed debonair teller of outlandish heroic tales introduced to the literary world in Rudolf Erich Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Rus...
Any Way the Wind Blows: A Jester’s Tale Cerise Howard June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film After three feature length triumphs mixing live-action with animation, Karel Zeman took a departure from sci-fi and fantasy missions implausible and instead engaged mockingly with terrible historical fact. With...
In and Out of the Mood: The 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard October 2014 Festival Reports This July just past I attended my second Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, my second in succession, as a member of a five critic-strong FIPRESCI jury. Accordingly, my main focus at the KVIFF this year w...
The Exquisite Ecstasy and Agony of Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure Cerise Howard June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Tactile wooden spoons, pot lids, rolling pins and boards are alchemistic tools and our bodies are the crucible for the Magnum Opus of tactilism.” - Jan Švankmajer (1) Jan Švankmajer’s third feature film, S...
The Festival that Came in from the South: The 28th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard June 2014 Festival Reports I've written three times previously in Senses of Cinema on the Fribourg International Film Festival, covering the festivals in 2010, '11 and '12. While I missed last year's FIFF, it is very clear that each succ...
Post-Soviet Bloc Partying West of the East and East of the West, Into and Out of the Past: The 48th Karlovy Vary and the 4th Odessa International Film Festival Cerise Howard September 2013 Festival Reports Mine was at least a twofold purpose for flying half way around the world to the far west late this June just passed. Long had I wanted to make my way to Karlovy Vary for the Czech Republic's A-list film festiva...
The Passion of the Peasant Poet: Jiří Trnka, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Hand Cerise Howard February 2013 CTEQ Annotations on Film “The very name conjures up childhood & poetry.” (1) – Jean Cocteau “‘Mr. Deitch, I am a very famous man!’ Jiří Trnka was indeed a very famous man – in Czechoslovakia and in the entire world of animation....
The South’s Not Long for This World: The 26th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard July 2012 Festival Reports In the wake of former Artistic Director Edouard Waintrop's triumphal, ceremonious departure to become Director of Les Cinémas du Grütli in Geneva at the close of last year's edition – all bouquets, nary a b...
Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin by William Beard; and Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin edited by David Church Cerise Howard March 2012 Book Reviews At the time of writing we are but a few weeks out from the 84th Academy Awards. Extraordinarily, the two films most likely to be most showered with Oscars at this year’s ceremony are The Artist (Michel Hazanavi...
A Twilight Portrait: A Report on the 21st Film Festival Cottbus, Festival of East European Cinema Cerise Howard December 2011 Festival Reports The Film Festival Cottbus: 21 this year! One might then pause to consider, with the festival attaining maturity (if we were to arbitrarily decide that 21 is, as we do with humans, a marker of such): does its mi...
Many Things to Ever More People: The 25th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard May 2011 Festival Reports For two years running I've attended the Fribourg International Film Festival. The timing of my engagements with the festival has been propitious; it strikes me that the FIFF is a festival just now coming into i...
Going South in 2010: Thinking Global, Talking Local: The 24th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard July 2010 Festival Reports To retain only the word cinema, without an adjective. – Edouard Waintrop, Director of the Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF) (1) This pocket manifesto from Director of FIFFs 22 through to 24 ended a ...
Turning X in an XXY World: The 10th Mezipatra Queer Film Festival Cerise Howard December 2009 Festival Reports A Quick Backgrounder, For Those Who Came in Late With its advent smack-bang on the first year of a new millennium, Mezipatra, the Czech Republic's queer film festival and, by a considerable margin, its large...
Flying Dreams of a Fledgling Festival: The 3rd Middle East International Film Festival Cerise Howard December 2009 Festival Reports Who'd a thunk it? All of a sudden the Persian Gulf is host to a slew of film festivals brimming with internationalist, top-tier ambition and seemingly mad keen to hothouse a vibrant homegrown film culture. T...
A Girl’s Own Adventure, or Something – but Not the Same Thing – for Everyone: The 19th Melbourne Queer Film Festival Cerise Howard July 2009 Festival Reports 18-29 March 2009 (1) In 2009, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) can – and does – still boast of being the second biggest film festival in Melbourne, quite an accomplishment in a city where, barrin...
Inside and Out: The 8th AniFest: International Festival of Animated Films Cerise Howard July 2009 Festival Reports Třeboň 1-4 May 2009 Teplice 7-10 May 2009 My second AniFest, after my first sally to the Czech Republic and its proliferative animation festival just last year (1), found me in the privileged position of re...
AniFest Destiny: The 7th AniFest: International Festival of Animated Films Cerise Howard August 2008 Festival Reports 7–13 May 2008 Such a hive of industry was the seventh AniFest, an annual international competitive festival – and much more besides – held in the small, picturesque South Bohemian town of Třeboň. For ato...
A Taxidermia Indeed: Stuffed to the Gills at MIFF Although Still a Little Miffed at Some Stuff: The 55th Melbourne International Film Festival Cerise Howard November 2006 Festival Reports 26 July – 13 August, 2006 Excepting an Opening Night publicity coup, of which, more below, the Melbourne International Film Festival’s last year with James Hewison as Executive Director unfurled much as ...